Energy-frugal Japan

According to The New York Times, Japan is a role model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat and gases - that had previously been released into the air or had burned off as waste - to generate much of its own electricity to power generators.

Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste give Japan the world’s most energy-efficient structure. Japan even urged the leaders of the G8 nations to adopt numerical targets as they discuss new ways to curb carbon dioxide emissions. The existing pacts, the original climate treaty from 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, have been called failures by energy and climate experts.

Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less.

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union did, or as the United States did, and one-eighth as much as China and India did in 2005. While the country is known for green products, like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan looks certain to fare better than other countries in the new era of high energy costs.